I
Fredson Thayer Bowers was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on 25
April 1905, the son of Fredson Eugene Bowers and Hattie May Quigley.
He was the only child of this couple, but he had two half-sisters, Ruth and
Rita Brownell, from his mother's previous marriage. The Bowers name
belonged to one of the oldest Connecticut families. A John Bower (or
Bowers) moved to New Haven in the 165os from Massachusetts (where the
family went back to the 163os) and became in 1672 the first minister in
Derby, Connecticut; "Bowers" was therefore regarded as one of New
Haven's "ancient" names (as in the first volume of Donald Lines Jacobus's
Families of Ancient New Haven, 1923). In later life Bowers
took some interest in his family's history but never investigated it, and he
lamented the fact that the results of his uncle Thomas's genealogical
researches had apparently not been preserved. He was unable to connect his
family to the early one with certainty; but because his father was born in
Derby, he liked to believe that the connection existed. His middle name,
Thayer, figured in his paternal grandmother's family, and he was proud of
its being "a good New England name, among the best in fact" (as he put it
in a letter of 1 April 1988 to his eldest son, Fredson Thayer Bowers,
Jr.—whose son, Fredson Thayer Bowers III, he hoped would in turn
carry on the tradition).
At the time of Bowers's birth, the family lived in the shadow of Yale
at 161 Whalley Avenue, and his father was president (and his uncle Thomas
secretary-treasurer) of the Gilbert Manufacturing Company, one of a
half-dozen corset-manufacturing companies in New Haven. It was a family
business, Gilbert being his paternal grandmother's maiden name; but his
father and uncle were early enthusiasts for automobiles and seemed to care
more about cars than corsets. In 1904 or 1905 they
added to the company's products such fabric items for automobile
passengers as aprons, covers, and leggins, and about 1906—07 his
father
established the F. E. Bowers Company, Inc., as a manufacturer of
carburetors and motor parts. Bowers was only one year old when the
automotive activities of his father and uncle were publicized in a local
magazine under the heading "Big Autos of the Town" (
Saturday
Chronicle, 28 July 1906)—a brief article illustrated with
photographs of the brothers in their cars. Thomas G. Bowers was shown in
the 30-horsepower machine that had been constructed to his specifications
from parts he had purchased on a trip; and Fredson E. Bowers was pictured
in his 25-horsepower Rambler, which had a "French grey" body of his own
design and was "One of the handsomest and speediest high powered
runabouts seen about the city." F. E. Bowers and his mechanic could be
observed "nearly every night burning up the roads in New Haven county,"
and one is tempted to
think that he sometimes took his son for rides and that this early
acquaintance with automobiles was the origin of Bowers's lifelong devotion
to sports cars. (He owned a succession of them, including a Jaguar, an
Alfa-Romeo, and a Mercedes; and his many nonstop drives to distant places
were—whether intentionally or not—in the tradition of his
father's
fondness for long automobile trips.) Bowers was not quite six when his
father died (on 9 February 1911, at the age of thirty-nine, while attending
the Chicago Automobile Show), bringing the brief existence of the F. E.
Bowers Company to an end; but the aura of automobile enthusiasm
continued as a presence in his life through his uncle and the fact that the
ongoing Gilbert Manufacturing Company had by 1909 switched exclusively
to automobile-related fabrics (the corset business being set up separately as
the Gilbert Corset Company).
Just before F. E. Bowers's death, the family had moved to West
Haven, but Hattie Bowers, as a widow, soon went back to New Haven and
then, in late 1913 or 1914, married Charles K. Groesbeck, a stenographer
at the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Bowers thus had a stepfather
during all his high-school and college years (in fact, Groesbeck's death on
13 June 1925 came just four days before Bowers's graduation from college;
his mother later took a fourth husband, George Bassermann). At this time
the family lived at 111 Brownell Street, within walking distance of New
Haven High Public School, which—at York Square—was
adjacent to
Yale and the old New Haven cemetery. In high school Bowers
took—besides the usual courses in composition, literature, chemistry,
and
geometry—two years of French, three of German, and two and a half
of
algebra (the latter perhaps foreshadowing his interest in bibliographical
collation formulas). In the summers he enjoyed outdoor
activities at camp, and he worked in a camp the summers before and after
his senior year (as he described in a letter of 10 March 1980 to his oldest
son):
When I was fifteen and sixteen I worked as a councillor in a summer
camp at Eastford, near Putnam, Connecticut, on Crystal Lake. I had been
at the camp for several years before and had had a fine time. I was hiking
master, and had to take the young boys out on overnight hikes, sometimes
canoe trips, just so long as they could sleep on the ground and have
flapjacks for breakfast, which I had to cook at the crack of dawn over an
improvised wood fire between a few stones.
Bowers graduated from New Haven General High School (as it was then
called) in 1921 and decided on Brown University as the place for his
college work.
In the autumn of 1921, at the age of sixteen, Bowers entered the
freshman class at Brown, where he majored in English; following an
introductory survey of English literature, he studied contemporary novels
with Kenneth O. Mason, Romantic literature with Percy Marks,
Shakespeare with George Wyllys Benedict, the English novel with Albert
Knight Potter, and modern English drama with Thomas Crosby, and in his
senior year he was one of the undergraduates admitted into Walter C.
Bronson's special graduate seminar. He also took basic courses in biology,
astronomy, philosophy, history, economics, music, Latin, Greek, and
Spanish, as well as more advanced courses in mathematics and French. The
year-long music course that he attended in his junior year is worth noting
because it no doubt played some role in causing music, and the detailed
analysis of it, to be an important element in his later life; this class, taught
by Gene Wilder Ware, the university organist, was designed (in the words
of the catalogue) for students "who wish to acquire an intelligent
understanding and enjoyment of good music." Bowers's marks were
sufficient to bring him scholarships, "preliminary honors," and junior-year
election to Phi Beta Kappa. In his first three years he received all As in his
English courses (with a few lower grades in some of the other subjects), but
his marks were distinctly less good in his senior year, no doubt because of
his many extracurricular activities.
In that year he was editor-in-chief of the Daily Herald
(the student newspaper), leader of the Glee Club (and thus co-director of
the program for concert tours through New England and a larger tour that
included Detroit, Kent, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Atlantic City, New York,
and Hartford), vice president of the Sphinx Club (a small faculty-student
group that met for discussion), and a member of the Varsity Quartet (as a
bass), the Banjo Club (and its Hawaiian Trio), the Cammarian Club (a
student governing board), and the editorial boards of the
Brown
Jug (the student humor magazine, which sold widely outside Brown)
and
Casements (the student literary magazine, which also
contained work by established writers and which was distributed nationally
through certain bookstores and newsstands). From his sophomore year on,
he had been active in the campus musical clubs and in the English Club (a
small group of a dozen or so that met every few weeks to discuss literary
matters and hear papers, such as his 15 October 1924 paper on
Vanity
Fair), as well as in several other clubs and his fraternity, Alpha
Delta
Phi. To earn money for living expenses, he also led a small jazz band,
playing saxophone and Hawaiian guitar himself. (The difficulties of putting
together sufficient money at this time may in part underlie the
thriftiness that was one of his lifelong characteristics.) The student
yearbook,
Liber Brunensis, offered this assessment of him at
the
end of his senior year:
"Fred" is one of God's little masterpieces, a true sophisticate. His
mental capacity is remarkable. He made Phi Bete without half trying; and,
besides winning every species of scholarship, won popular recognition in
no small way. "Fred" has not confined himself to college activities during
the last four years, however, and is decidedly a man about town. We expect
great things from "Fred" within the next few years.
Those who knew him later in his life will not be surprised by these
comments or by the energy level reflected in his college record.
The most important extracurricular activity of his senior year was not
mentioned in the yearbook: in the fall of that year, at the age of nineteen,
he got married. On 11 November 1924, at St. Ignatius (Protestant
Episcopal) Church in New York, he wed Hyacinth Adeline Sutphen, a 1924
graduate of Smith College (a French major) and a member of a New York
Social Register family that was descended from Dirck van
Zutphen, a seventeenth-century Dutch settler in New Amsterdam. She was
two years and four months older than Bowers (born 18 December 1902),
the youngest of four children of John Schureman Sutphen and Mary Tier
Brown, and had lived with her parents at their place in Ormond, Florida,
as well as at 311 West 72nd Street in New York (not far from St. Ignatius
Church, at West End Avenue and 87th Street). Perhaps because of her
social standing, the marriage was written up in the New York
Times (13 November 1924), in an article headed "Brown Senior
Weds Hyacinth Sutphen:
F. T. Bowers, Rhodes Scholarship Candidate, and Smith College Student
Marry Secretly." Some of the
circumstances of the secrecy, though not the background of it, were
described:
The wedding was arranged with the utmost secrecy, the only person
at the university who knew of the plan being a close friend and classmate
of the bridegroom who acted as best man [Emile Seth Hall]. When Bowers
left his fraternity house Monday, saying he was going to New Haven, his
announcement was regarded with skepticism, and a few of his fraternity
brothers, believing he was going to be married, showered him with
rice.
After a brief honeymoon at Hot Springs, Virginia, Bowers was again
immersed in his hectic round of activities at Brown.
Aside from his marriage, the most notable aspect of his undergraduate
life, particularly in light of his later career, is the large amount of writing
he produced. In addition to an introductory composition course, he took a
year-long intermediate course in his sophomore year and a year-long
advanced one in his senior year, the former taught by Percy Marks and the
latter by George Wyllys Benedict. Under Marks's encouragement, the
students in his class brought out an anthology of their classwork in late May
1923. Bowers was one of three editors of The Anthology of English
3,4, and the piece of his included in it was a short story called
"Release," about the suicide of a young opium addict, whose life had
always been in a world of dreams and whose final dream was of a
"grinning idiot" who "sang the idle tale of life" and pulled "the gossamer
strings that made men love and hate, kill and destroy," wailing futilely as
the universe "plunged to destruction through icy aeons of
space."
Marks, a popular young professor, was at that time working on his
first novel, The Plastic Age, which after publication in early
1924 became a best seller (and later a film), famous for its portrayal of
jazz-age college life and its emphasis on alcohol and sex. Everyone at
Brown assumed that the novel depicted the local scene (the review in
Casements said that it "tells the truth"), and it apparently cost
Marks his job. (An editorial in the Herald on 26 May
1924—after Bowers had become editor on 3 May—called the
loss of
Marks "a decided blow to the many men who have taken courses with
him.") However much "Sanford College" in the novel was in fact based on
Brown (or on Dartmouth, where Marks had previously taught), the book
probably did reflect the literary situation at Brown in Bowers's time, as in
passages like the following:
The wave of materialism was swept back by an inrushing tide of
idealism. Students suddenly ceased to concentrate in economics and filled
the English and philosophy classes to overflowing. . . . The "Sanford
Literary Magazine,"
which had been slowly perishing for several years, became almost as
popular as the "Cap and Bells," the comic magazine, which coined money
by publishing risqué jokes and pictures of slightly dressed women.
. .
. the intelligent majority began to read and discuss books openly, and the
intelligent majority ruled the campus. (pp. 228-229)
This assessment is supported, from various sources, by Jay Martin in his
1970 biography of Nathanael West, who was in the Brown class of 1924:
"Between 1922 and 1924," he says, "Brown was genuinely invaded by
modern ideas," producing a "literary awakening" (p. 66). That Marks
showed this element of Ivy League college life along with the partying and
the snobbishness makes his account considerably more subtle than Upton
Sinclair's characterization of Brown—in another contemporary book,
The Goose-Step (1923)—as an institution ("almost as
snobbish
as Princeton") "catering to the sons of the plutocracy" with "a regime of
intellectual dry-rot" (pp. 309-310). Although Bowers was one of the
students with whom Marks was familiar while the novel was in progress,
there is no character in it that seems obviously based on him. The hero,
who plans to go to Harvard for graduate work, makes the "long trip" to
New York just before graduation to propose marriage to the woman he had
taken
to the prom the year before, and he is rejected; Bowers's very different
excursion to New York to get married occurred ten months after the book
was published.
Bowers, however, did use the widespread knowledge of Marks's book
as the background for twenty-six lines in heroic couplets, entitled "The
Plastic Age," which he published in the Brown Jug in
February
1925. The opening and closing went as follows:
Sing, ye muses, of our college drear,
O'erhung by terror and possessed with fear!
The liberal spirit slinking through our halls
To deaf ears plaintively repeats its calls,
It dare not stop or in the open lie,
For to be discovered is to die,
Our bald head trustees sit upon our needs,
And there are none to bite the hand that feeds!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Aflame with bootleg gin we spend the night,
A throbbing headache follows on delight,
But that is but a trifling price to pay,
For we can sleep in classes all next day;
Gone is the hardy Baptist true to fear,
Alas, alas! The Plastic Age is here!
The "headache" no doubt reflected Bowers's own experience, for in later
life he told stories about his special recipe for bathtub gin in college.
Although he apparently contributed unsigned items (as a "Juggler") to six
issues of the
Brown Jug, his only other signed piece was a
free-verse poem, "A Coat of Arms for Prom Hosts" (May 1924), in
pseudo-antique English.
In his junior year Bowers appeared three times in
Casements, the second appearance causing a considerable
sensation. His piece in the January 1924 number (published in December
1923), entitled "The Passing Show," consisted of brief parodies of
Frederick O'Brien, Theodore Dreiser, Amy Lowell, and D. H. Lawrence.
In the Lawrence parody (based on the rabbit scene in Women in
Love, the trade printing of which had been published in America
fourteen months before), a man and a woman, standing by a rabbit pen,
look at each other "sensually," and "the white arctic snow in him was lit
with a rosy flush of passion, like fingers of sunset glow creeping across
barren, white wastes." Then they watch a male rabbit "vigorously trying to
overtake his frailer paramour," chasing her into "the dusky, dark
gloomness" of the rabbit house:
"Do you really think that rabbit ran as fast as she could?" he asked
soberly. Her long eyes lit up with a flare of obscene mirth. He looked at
her, and she looked at him. They knew they were initiates together. She
was still looking at him, and her sea green eyes made his flesh tingle. He
looked at his watch and swore softly to himself. There were yet three hours
more of daylight.
This kind of writing was unacceptable to city officials in Providence, and
on 22 December the Assistant City Solicitor, declaring the parody to be
"clearly obscene and unfit for public reading," ordered that copies of the
issue be withdrawn from sale and that uncooperative booksellers and
newsdealers be prosecuted (as the
Boston Globe reported in
some detail the next day).
Bowers suspected that his piece was called to the attention of the
authorities by his classmate S. J. Perelman as a prank. Many years later
Bowers wrote to Dorothy Herrmann, while she was working on her
biography of Perelman (1986), describing the episode:
Suddenly the Providence chief of police and various ministers started
getting anonymous letters protesting the "filth" that was being published on
the Hill, and demanding action. So of course the Dean got involved, and
the editor of the magazine—Gordon Keith Chalmers, who later
became
president of Kenyon—and I were hauled on the carpet for an
explanation.
. . . this is
what I then thought to be a typical Perelman jape, writing letters to the
clergy and the police in such a high moral tone and demanding action. That
is, it was a jape that fitted the
Brown Jug's idea of humor.
But
he never admitted it. (p. 38)
Certainly Bowers and Perelman knew each other well at that time, being
fellow members of the English and Sphinx clubs and fellow contributors to
the
Herald, and their college careers continued to intersect.
A
few months later, when Bowers was chairman of the committee for the 1924
St. Patrick's Day Vaudeville Show (in part a parody of
The Plastic
Age, and one of the "bawdiest productions ever to be staged at
Brown," according to Herrmann), Perelman was the set designer for
it—and Quentin Reynolds one of the writers, and Nathanael West an
actor in it. (The
Herald on 27 March called it "undoubtedly
the
greatest single theatrical production and the finest example of histrionic art
ever seen on the campus.") The following year, when Bowers edited the
Herald, Perelman was editor of the
Brown Jug;
and
Bowers, perhaps in retaliation for the
Casements affair,
attacked
Perelman's handling of the
Jug (on 22 November 1924 and
6
January 1925) and
initiated an editorial feud between the two publications. (The
Herald's [i.e., Bowers's?] criticism of the
Jug
for
being imitative of H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan reinforces Percy
Marks's later recollection of his students' papers: "A bundle of themes
turned into an
American Mercury in my hand" [
The
Craft
of Writing, 1932].)
Bowers's other contributions to Casements, in the
numbers for November 1923 and March 1924, were less controversial than
his parodies, but perhaps more revealing. The earlier one, "The Street That
Ends in the Sea," was a short allegorical piece describing the movements
of people roaming a street of shops, with its "crooked bylanes," that led to
a "shimmering blue" sea ("promising rest"), which some people glanced at
"furtively" and others seemed not to notice at all. The other piece,
"Whitney Warren," was a five-page story describing the thoughts going
through the mind of a man as he was being hanged for murder. (The
naming of the title character suggests that architecture was not one of the
arts Bowers followed closely; otherwise he would presumably not have used
the name of one of the prominent architects of the day, a partner in the firm
of Warren & Wetmore and designer of the facade of Grand Central
Terminal.) Whether Warren's thoughts were Bowers's own is difficult
to say, but the story can plausibly be seen as an undergraduate's
proclamation of his rejection of conventional religion and morality. The title
character had "felt no desire" to talk to the chaplain but "had gone through
with the interview as an inescapable part of the
necessary rigmarole"; his philosophy "had finally matured and hardened
into a strange mixture of materialism and individualism." As he died, he
felt himself slowly being absorbed into space. There was no Heaven
nor Hell, God nor Devil, but simply exhilarating ever-extending space. And
as he was sucked out into the tide of the caressing darkness and made one
with it, his whole being thrilled with the wordless ecstasy of the one end for
which he had hoped.
Like Whitney Warren, Bowers may also have "often tried to imagine the
beginning of the whole colossal system of the universe"; and he perhaps
sympathized with Warren's feeling that he "had loved words and their
magic power almost as well as he had loved life itself."
At any rate, words were the subject of the one undergraduate piece
of Bowers's that reached a sizable national audience. The 14 March 1925
number of the widely circulated Literary Digest, under the
heading "College Slang a Language All Its Own," reprinted an article that
Bowers had written, "as summarized by the Providence
Journal
and the Brooklyn Eagle." In the article as printed there,
Bowers
wrote that college "slanguage" was "like a foreign tongue even to the
graduate of a few years ago, and entirely unintelligible to the outside
public." One of the examples he provided was an imaginary conversation
beginning, "Why, hello Jim, you're looking pretty smooth to-night.
Where'd you get the doggy scarf? Old Joe Brooks himself, aren't you."
Whether this article derived from one of Bowers's editorials in the
Daily Herald is not certain, but there was an editorial on 23
February 1925 entitled "Diction on the Campus," complaining about college
slang, which
is "unintelligible to the average man," and lecturing its readers rather
pompously on their "responsibility for the precious heritage of the English
tongue" (it did not, however, give examples of slang).
Bowers must have written many of the editorials during his senior
year, and many news stories during his four years on the staff. But most
Herald articles were unsigned, and his have not been
identified,
except for a series of five reviews signed "F.T.B." In a review of
Casements, he noted that "S. J. Perelman contributes a
divagation in his best manner" (6 May 1924); another review judged May
Sinclair's Arnold Waterlow to show "a psychological intuition
and perception almost unrivalled among modern authors" (30 September
1924); Anne Douglas Sedgwick's The Little French Girl was
"one of the best novels of the present age" (7 October 1924); Ernest
Brace's Commencement achieved "a real and interesting
picture
of life" (10 November 1924); and Sarah Gertrude Millin's God's
Stepchildren contained "a breadth of life which can almost
be said to be complete" (24 March 1925). Even without knowing more of
his
Herald pieces, one can nevertheless say that the fluency
Bowers gained from all his undergraduate writing, as well as the discipline
of meeting deadlines and administering a periodical, proved valuable to him
later on.
Bowers graduated from Brown with a Ph.B. on 17 June 1925 and
turned his thoughts to graduate school at Harvard. He and his wife moved
into 10 Dana Street, Cambridge, and he began his coursework in the fall
of 1925. It was natural, given his English major at Brown and his interest
in writing, that his graduate work would be in English; what led him to
concentrate on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in his first year,
however, is not as evident. But after taking George Lyman Kittredge's
Shakespeare course and J. Tucker Murray's pre-1642 non-Shakespearean
drama course that year, his direction was set. Kittredge made a deep
impression on him, and he eventually wrote his dissertation under
Kittredge's direction. More than half a century later Bowers recalled with
admiration the characteristics of Kittredge's teaching. In the preface to his
collected essays on Shakespeare (1989), he said that the essays "share a
common background from the active teaching of a relatively few plays
in the Kittredge manner of close analysis although with a different focus
from his":
It used to be a standing joke that George Lyman Kittredge's students,
inspired, all went out to teach Shakespeare like him—and promptly
failed. In fact, failure could be anticipated because Kittredge's extraordinary
memory, reaching to total recall, his thorough philological grounding, his
wide reading in classical, medieval, and Renaissance culture, and especially
the powerful thrust of his associative and analytical mind, all gathered
together in one uniquely forceful teacher—these made him inimitable.
Nevertheless, he put a stamp on his students that was permanent.
Murray's teaching was also influential: Bowers said in the preface to his
dissertation that the topic "would never have been undertaken had not I
among so many others fallen under the spell of Professor John Tucker
Murray's enthusiasm for the Elizabethan drama"; and a term paper for
Murray, growing out of A. H. Thorndike's 1902
PMLA
article
on "The Relations of
Hamlet to the Contemporary Revenge
Play," became the germ for the dissertation.
Other glimpses of Bowers's study at Harvard occasionally crop up in
later writings—as when, in an obituary of Greg (1959), he said, "In
the
United States of the late 1920's my generation cut its teeth on McKerrow's
Introduction." Another time (in a letter on 18 April 1976),
he
commented on one of his critics by saying that "he does not know of the
philological training one got at Harvard in my day!" This training consisted,
in Bowers's case, of a year of Anglo-Saxon (under Kittredge, F. N.
Robinson, and Kenneth G. T. Webster), two years of Middle English (one
on Chaucer and one on other literature of the period, both taught by
Robinson and John S. P. Tatlock), a year of Old French ("Phonology and
Inflections" taught by J. D. M. Ford), and a half-year of
"Gothic—Introduction to the Study of German Philology" (under R.
M.
S. Heffner)—the latter a course he postponed taking until the fall of
1931.
The other major influence on him at Harvard, besides Kittredge and
Murray, was Hyder Edward Rollins, whose year-long course in Elizabethan
nondramatic poetry he took in 1927-28, his third year. (Howard Mumford
Jones later said that Rollins, "in many minds the successor of Kittredge,
was the idol of the graduate students" [An Autobiography,
1979, p. 204].) At the end of this course, on 3 May 1928, Bowers
submitted a remarkable paper of 338 typed pages bound in hard
cover—bound at the time he turned it in, for Rollins's comment is
on the
front free endpaper. Entitled "The Authorship of A Hundreth Sundrie
Flowres," the paper argued against B. M. Ward's suggestion that
some of the poems were by other persons than Gascoigne. In his ten-line
comment, Rollins said, "A very remarkable study for a mere course-thesis.
. . . Congratulations on your interest and industry and intelligence!" Not
surprisingly, he gave the paper a grade of A; less expected was his final
comment,
"Gratifying, too, to see that you write much more carefully since the
December jolt!" Presumably the jolt was a severe criticism from him (and
perhaps also from Kittredge, with whom Bowers was taking an
independent-study course at the same time). Bowers's facility in writing
sometimes resulted in a diffuseness that was to be a problem throughout his
life, and apparently he was warned about it at this point. The Gascoigne
paper is of particular interest for its focus on authorship (which naturally
has bibliographical and textual implications) and for such bibliographical
knowledge as it reveals—the use of title-page transcription and
signature
reference notation, for instance. It also contains what is probably the
earliest surviving indication of his awareness of W. W. Greg's work: in
criticizing Ward's theory of an Oxford code, he said, "Now I protest, even
though Greg thinks it good, that this is not an honest cipher" (p.
299).
Most of his course-related writing during these years obviously dealt
with Elizabethan and Jacobean literature and no doubt underlay his
earliest scholarly publications, which began in 1930, while he was engaged
in writing his dissertation. His first scholarly article, in the March 1930
number of
Modern Language Notes, argued that the
anonymous
poetic satire
Machiavells Dogge (1617) was in fact by
Nicholas
Breton; the argument used no physical bibliographical evidence but instead
relied entirely on the existence of many borrowed passages from an
established Breton work and on similarities of tone and style. One of
Rollins's editions was cited in a footnote, and an acknowledgment of
Rollins's help was made in Bowers's next publication, "Kyd's Pedringano:
Sources and Parallels" in
Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and
Literature for 1931. Bowers appeared twice more in
Harvard
Studies, in 1933 and 1934, both articles dealing with attribution of
authorship: the earlier ruled out Chapman as author of
Alphonsus, and the later was a condensed version of the
Gascoigne paper he had
written for Rollins (who was one of the editors of
Harvard
Studies as of 1934). He also published twice more at this time in
Modern Language Notes (in 1932 and 1933), referring on the
second occasion to Kittredge's assistance, and he placed a substantial article
in
Studies in Philology (1934).
These three pieces dealt with revenge tragedy and were offshoots of
his dissertation, "A History of Elizabethan Revengeful Tragedy." (In his
preface he credited the origin of his title to a mistaken footnote in Allardyce
Nicoll's Restoration Drama, citing a nonexistent book
supposedly called "History of Revengeful Drama.") He pursued this topic
with the same thoroughness he had displayed in the Gascoigne paper; and
in January 1934, after some five years' work, he presented his committee
with an 1100-page study (bound in three volumes), dedicated "gratefully"
to Kittredge, and was officially awarded his Ph.D. degree in February. His
primary acknowledgments (besides the one to Murray) were naturally to
Kittredge ("for his unfailing interest, his multitude of valuable suggestions,
his careful reading of my manuscript, and for the stimulating hours I have
spent in discussion with him") and Rollins ("for reading part of this thesis,
for various valuable suggestions, and for his
constant inspiration to me as a model of modern scholarship"). At the end
of his list he added, "my deepest gratitude is due my wife who undertook,
during years of listening to an idée fixe, the arduous
work
of typing this thesis." The main text consisted of two large sections, one on
"The Theory and Practice of Revenge" (a third of the whole), tracing the
concept back to antiquity, followed by one on "The Elizabethan Tragedy of
Revenge" (some 650 pages), containing (after a discussion of
"Antecedents") separate treatments of sixty-five plays. His own four-page
epitome of the dissertation appeared in the Summaries of
Theses, but an
even more condensed statement in his own words can be found in a footnote
to his
Studies in Philology article: "I am at present
completing
a history of Elizabethan revenge tragedy from the particular point of view
of its relation to the life and ethics of the time and their effect upon its
structure, characterization, and ethics." Six years later a shortened version
of this work became his first scholarly book.
During his nine years of graduate study, he taught at Harvard every
year but the first and the last two; while taking courses his title was
Assistant in English, and while writing his dissertation he was Instructor in
English and Tutor in the Modern Languages. He stayed on in the latter
position for two years following the award of his degree and traveled to
England in the summer between them (1935) on a Charles Dexter
Scholarship (he had also been a Dexter Scholar in the summer of 1928,
when he had done research for his dissertation at the British Museum, the
Bodleian Library, and the libraries of Emmanuel and Trinity Colleges,
Lambeth Palace, and the Guildhall). The Bowerses' first son, Fredson
Thayer Bowers, Jr., was born on 7 April 1927, and in mid-1927 the family
moved from Dana Street to 5 Concord Avenue. The next year they moved
again, to 987 Memorial Drive, where a second child, Joan Sutphen Bowers,
was born on 28 February 1931. She later remembered that her father put
her
to sleep at night by reading Old English poetry to her. One more move, to
110 Forest Avenue in West Newton, came in mid-1931, and on 3 April
1934 twin sons were born, named Peter Dirck Sutphen Bowers and Stephen
Hyder Gilbert Bowers (the latter obviously named for Bowers's Harvard
adviser Hyder Rollins and his paternal grandmother's family). (The four
children made their careers, respectively, in insurance, accounting, finance,
and counselling, and they eventually provided Bowers with a total of
twenty-two grandchildren.) The move to the suburbs not only
accommodated the growing family but allowed Bowers to indulge his love
of dogs: the first dog was just a pet for the children, but soon he acquired
pure-bred hounds to display in shows. His wife enjoyed golf, tennis,
skating, and skiing, and he joined her in these activities and took pictures
of her and the children on their various outings. (He later claimed that he
gave up golf after he broke par and it no longer seemed a
challenge.) His oldest son recently recalled Bowers's enthusiasm for moving
pictures:
Dad became a proficient, amateur film maker when we were young.
He had a Bell & Howell 16 mm camera and projector [then in vogue
among knowledgeable home-movie makers] together with bright spotlights
for indoor photography. Each film was, for the most part, a complete story
(such as a day at kindergarten) and many had titles. Unfortunately, he did
most of the
photography and my mother was not geared to movie making, so that in
3,600 feet of film one sees only a split second of him skiing down the small
hill across the street or the very end of a golf swing, although there is one
segment lasting some 20 seconds of the two of us at a sled dog farm in the
Adirondacks. When my mother died I discovered a large number of rolls
of this film, dusty and many entirely off the reels. I spent one winter
cleaning, organizing in chronological order and splicing, and eventually
they were transferred to videotape. We have my father to thank for
approximately an hour and a half of invaluable family history.
The pleasures of family life were not destined to continue, however, for the
Bowerses began to have marital problems, and they separated in 1935 and
were divorced on 29 January 1936. Bowers had moved back into
Cambridge, and his wife and the children stayed on in the West Newton
house, where she continued to live until near the time of her death from
arteriosclerosis on 13 May 1967. (She was married again on 17 October
1940, to Edward Bass Hall, and was divorced from him in 1946.) For the
1936-37 academic year, Bowers accepted an instructorship at Princeton; his
move in the summer of 1936 ended an eleven-year association with
Harvard, and with an area that held many family memories.
During the Harvard years Bowers developed an interest in Irish
wolfhounds and pursued this interest with great intensity, fitting it into a
life already crowded with family activities, graduate studies, and teaching.
This avocation is the best documented early instance of his drive toward
professionalism, or at least mastery and authority, in any field that captured
his attention. No doubt this trait of his personality had shown itself
previously (and was in part responsible for his energetic undergraduate
writing career), but it left its earliest permanent mark in connection with
dogs, for his first book was on this subject. In late 1932, at a dog show in
Boston, he saw some of the Irish wolfhounds belonging to Charles D.
Burrage, Jr. (who was to become one of the prominent breeders of these
hounds, at his Rathain Kennels in Needham Heights, not far from where
Bowers lived); and as Bowers said in his earliest writing for the
American Kennel Gazette (March 1934), "It was a
case of love at first sight." He received expert advice both from Burrage
and from Frank T. Eskrigge, a veteran dog-show judge and dog-magazine
writer who also lived nearby (in Newton Centre); and under their tutelage
he made—in the spring of 1933—an impeccable entry into the
world
of pure-bred dogs by importing a male, Sulhamstead Gala, from Florence
Nagle, whose Sulhamstead Kennels (near Reading in
Berkshire) were to become as celebrated a source of champions as she
herself was to become a colorful and outspoken figure among dog- and
horse-fanciers. A few months later, in the summer of 1933, he bought
another male, Whippoorwill Major Kilkelly, bred by Mrs. Amory L.
Haskell at her Whippoorwill Kennels in Red Bank, N.J., and at the end of
the year he imported a bitch, Sulhamstead Kiora, from Mrs. Nagle. In the
March 1934 article he described these three hounds in detail, emphasizing
Gala, whose "head has been rather generally admired": "He is a light cream
color, with just a suspicion of grey brindle on the underthroat and a tail
which darkens to black at the tip." Bowers broke off his description with
the comment, "He's so much my favorite that I can't say anything more
about him without going into a rhapsody."
The same article provides some delightful glimpses into Bowers's life
at this time:
I live in West Newton, Mass., a suburb of Boston, and,
unfortunately, the land is pretty well built up. I am able, however, to have
a run about 150 feet by 50 for the dogs, and since there is hardly any
traffic nearby, I often let one out alone, to roam as he pleases. Since I am
fortunate in having some leisure, I am able to give all three regular exercise
by walking with me, almost every day, for several miles.
They have quickly picked up the elementary training of staying on the
same side of the street with me—as they go without
leashes—and of
stopping at corners on command—and often without—until
told to
cross. I will admit that the sight of another dog rather upsets the rules,
unless I see it first and get in the commands to heel before they have a
chance to be off. . . .
Now that the golf season is in abeyance, I take them to a neighboring
course where they romp over the fairways and have a gorgeous time. They
are outdoors all day, but come in for the evening with me where they
behave themselves as quietly and decorously as could be desired until taken
out to their quarters again at bed time.
I like to take one or more with me when I go out, and so far my
friends haven't barred their doors.
The hounds like to ride in the car. It's surprising how well two can
curl up on the back seat of a smallish sedan, and I've even had three in the
car without discomfort on their parts. All three are beloved by my two
small children, and they get on famously together.
Although one wonders how Bowers could have had "some leisure" during
this period, he obviously enjoyed walking the dogs and making them good
pets as well as show dogs. His reference here to taking them on sidewalks
anticipates another article of his in the
American Kennel
Gazette
a few months later (October 1934) on "Training Dogs for the Street," which
is accompanied by six wonderfully evocative photographs
of Bowers's dogs, the West Newton neighborhood, Bowers's oldest son
(then seven years old), and Bowers himself. Anyone who knew Bowers, or
his writings, later can easily imagine that he was good at disciplining his
dogs: "I have never," he says in this article, "found the necessity of
punishing my dogs, except with a scolding."
By early 1934 Bowers had worked out his plans as a breeder:
My ambition is to establish a strain stemming from Conncara
[Sulhamstead Conncara, the primary basis for the fame of the line bred by
Mrs. Nagle] —with the creams and reds of which I am so
fond—on the
one side and Kilmorac [of the historic Felixstowe Kennels in England] on
the other. So if Kiora doesn't prove in whelp, I intend to breed her, in
June, either to my Gala or to some good dog in this country descended
from Kilmorac, and probably to keep a dog for showing with Gala and
perhaps a bitch for breeding.
Kiora was not in whelp (though Bowers had already advertised for sale "a
few Irish Wolfhound puppies imported in utero"), and Bowers's program
changed slightly. He bought Top Lady of Ambleside from Mr. and Mrs. L.
O. Starbuck's famous Ambleside Kennels of Augusta, Michigan, and bred
her to a dog called Brian Boru (owned by Mrs. Randolph C. Grew); on 6
September 1934, Top Lady produced a litter of seven, which Bowers named
Ban, Brian, Deirdre, Graysteel, Juno, Morhault, and Shaun, each one with
the suffix "of the Fen" attached ("Ban of the Fen," etc.). Early in 1935 he
bred Top Lady to his own Sulhamstead Gala, and a litter of five resulted
on 12 March 1935—named Cabal, Dark Rosaleen, Degare, Hodain,
and
Yseult (again, "of the Fen"). To announce the availability of these puppies,
he took a full-page advertisement in the 1934-35 volume of
Annual
Reports of the Irish Wolfhound Club of America (IWCA), headed
"The Irish Wolfhounds of the Fen," showing a picture of Kiora and
noting that Bedlington terrier puppies were "occasionally available."
Meanwhile he had shown Gala extensively (and Kiora somewhat less so),
beginning with the Bridgewater (Massachusetts) Kennel Club show on 2
September 1933. By mid-1934 Gala had been shown sixteen times in seven
states and on 20 July 1934 earned the last of the requisite points to become
a champion of American Kennel Club record (the thirty-fifth Irish
wolfhound to achieve this status). Although Bowers showed Gala several
more times, he began to be asked to judge Irish wolfhounds and in 1935
appeared at two shows as judge rather than exhibitor—the beginning
of
what was to be a long association with dog-show judging.
Bowers became well known in dog circles not only because he
possessed a champion but also because he wrote about dogs with some
frequency.
Besides his article on training dogs for the street, he published a piece
entitled "Novices All Need the Sympathetic Judging of Their Dogs"
(
American Kennel Gazette, April 1935)—full of
eminently
sensible advice that suggests how thoughtfully Bowers approached his own
duties as a judge. When he returned from his summer in England in 1935,
he wrote for the
Annual Reports of the IWCA a fascinating
account of the various kennels he had visited abroad (he was also a member
of the Irish Wolfhound Club in England) and the shows he had attended
there ("English Notes and Comments"). His love of dogs showed through
clearly in everything he wrote about them, as in this concluding sentence
of that essay:
it was a very warming sensation to experience as I did unfailingly the
constant courtesy and friendliness of the English breeders and to transmit
to owners on this side of the ocean their sincere interest, encouragement,
and sympathy with our efforts to breed and to popularize the very finest
specimens possible of the noblest of all dogs, the love of which makes any
nation kin.
In addition to submitting articles to the
American Kennel
Gazette, he was assiduous in sending accounts of his activities to L.
O. Starbuck, who conducted the column on Irish wolfhounds, and several
of his letters were quoted there. The August 1935 column consisted entirely
of Bowers's description of the Irish Wolfhound Association of New
England, which he had been instrumental in forming the previous
November; he wrote the June 1936 column on the subject of coursing; and
in the September 1936 column Starbuck quoted Bowers's description and
analysis of the stuffed specimens he had seen the previous summer in
London at the Museum of Natural History. In that same column Starbuck
said, "I have to credit Fredson Bowers with the most marked loyalty to the
breed in helping to furnish something of interest from time to time."
His principal writing on dogs while still at Harvard was a book-length
general introduction to all breeds, which he dedicated to his dog-world
mentor Frank Eskrigge and which Houghton Mifflin published as
The
Dog Owner's Handbook in October 1936 (just after he had begun
teaching at Princeton). The front of the dust jacket was labeled "A
Guaranteed Dog Book," and the flap explained, "Any purchaser who is not
satisfied with it may return the book within five days for refund." In the
preface he stated his qualifications for producing a work "squarely intended
for the average pet dog owner or the person thinking of buying a dog":
I have progressed from owning one pet dog, and then in rapid
succession several more, to the stage where I am breeding for a purpose
and have dogs
about me continually. That some of my dogs are raised at home and that I
have not instituted regular kennel conditions, and that these dogs for the
show ring are still treated as pet dogs, makes me somewhat closer, I feel,
to the average owner and perhaps a little better suited to consider his
problems than the average kennelman, professional breeder, or veterinarian.
In my treatment of my own dogs I have tried to balance the theory gained
from extended reading with the practical experience which is never ended
with dogs until the owner departs from this world.
This combination of "theory" with "practical experience" was to be a
hallmark of his writing from then on: he was not temperamentally attracted
to theory for its own sake, as he often pointed out, and his works are filled
with illustrative examples drawn from his own experience. He vowed in this
preface to eschew "windy generalities" and to speak frankly about the
merits and demerits of individual breeds, risking "the charge of personal
prejudice" in order "to be of as great help as possible" through his own
"experience with several breeds, a fairly intimate acquaintance with many,
and observation of the rest." In a straightforward, serviceable style
(addressing the reader in the second person), he covered all the expected
topics, from selecting dogs to training and showing them; the heart of the
book was a long chapter on "The Dogs Themselves," describing the
history, uses, and characteristics of forty-two breeds and offering advice
about each. Bowers's partiality for the Irish
wolfhound came through in his account of it as a "thoroughly satisfactory
dog in every way. No owner ever changes to any other large breed" (p.
69). Another similar—and similarly titled—book (but more
technical
and more suited for the kennel owner), Josephine Z. Rine's
The Dog
Owner's Manual, was brought out by Coward-McCann at almost
precisely the same time. Frank Dole reviewed both books (and five other
more specialized ones) in the book section of the
New York Herald
Tribune on 20 December 1936, praising them both but treating
Bowers's first and calling it one of the better of the Christmas books "for
the person not very well acquainted with the field." He found Bowers's
book "capably done" and "written so that the reader incurs a natural desire
to learn more of the intricacies of dogdom." The book had some success,
for it was reprinted by the Sun Dial Press in 1940 and was still mentioned
in the 1950s in some of the lists of recommended books that appeared in
the American Kennel Club's magazine.
During 1935 Bowers sold many of his puppies, and in March of
1936, following his divorce and in anticipation of his move to Princeton,
he sold his remaining hounds. (Both Sulhamstead Kiora and Top Lady of
Ambleside became champions later that year.) Bowers's oldest son recently
recalled, "When the dogs and puppies were sold, I more or less inherited
the dog house, and a dozen or so of us neighborhood children used it as a
clubhouse"—the structure being "eight or nine feet long" and "six
feet
wide and six feet high," with "two levels, a door and window high up at
each end for ventilation." From time to time after that, Bowers considered
owning some hounds once more: Alma J. Starbuck (L. O. Starbuck's
widow) said, in her November 1947 report on the Specialty Show held two
months earlier, "It was good to see Fredson Bowers again, looking quite the
same and letting us know it's just a question of a little time before he will
again have a Wolfhound on the lead." But he never did; from 1936 on, his
activities in the dog world were limited to writing and judging, though he
did a considerable amount of both. After writing two more columns for the
American Kennel Gazette (in January 1937 a thoughtful piece
on the relative popularity of Irish wolfhounds
among American dog owners, and in July an account of the latest Morris
and Essex Kennel Club show, the first major show that he had judged),
Bowers was chosen by Alma Starbuck as her successor to handle this
column. In the December 1937 number Bowers wrote:
It came as a considerable shock to me to read in the November
Gazette's column that Mrs. Starbuck was going to relinquish this space after
so many years of friendly and continually interesting service. Of course, I
was very interested in who was the unfortunate person relegated the task of
maintaining the pace after the First Lady of our Irish Wolfhound ranks. I
discovered who, in my morning mail a week later. Fortunately, I'm as
sorry for the readers as I am for myself.
After asking for contributions, he warned his readers, "My main business
is mounting the lecture platform, and if you all don't combine to keep me
off it here, on your own heads be it"; and he then reported on the
Richmond show that he had attended on his visit to England in the summer
of 1937, recognizing that the English level "is still way and above ours."
For the next three years, through the December 1940 column (when Bowers
wrote, "And, Santa Claus, give us a new columnist"), Bowers conducted
the column vigorously, missing only September and October of 1938
(because of his move to Virginia), July through October 1939 (because of
a trip to England), and July 1940.
These thirty columns, totaling about 30,000 words, covered such
topics as current shows (e.g., January and April 1938 and March 1940, the
latter dealing with a show he judged), the formation of a Mid-Atlantic Irish
Wolfhound Association (July 1938), coursing (August
1938), Irish wolfhound history (June 1939, a column that links Bowers's
literary and canine interests with its report of a previously unnoticed
reference to the breed in Wycherley's
The Gentleman Dancing
Master of 1672), the hardiness of the breed (November 1939 and
January 1940), and the economics of wolfhound-raising (December 1939,
where Bowers says that the hound "still remains the best of all the large
breeds, but he simply has not been sold to the public as the Great Dane has
been"). (Bowers also treated the history of Irish wolfhounds in a major
article in the May 1939 number.) The subject that came up most often,
however, in about a dozen of the columns, was the possible revision of the
official standard of excellence for Irish wolfhounds. Bowers's view
(February 1938) was that, although the sixty-year-old standard was out of
date, it should probably be retained "as an historical document" and should
be provided with "a series of supplementary notes which can be
printed with the standard as a fuller and more complete guide to the ideal
of the Irish wolfhound." That Bowers should have involved himself actively
in this matter is not surprising, for his mind was attracted to categorization
and systematization, and the problem was not unlike the bibliographical
question he later addressed concerning the description of "ideal" copies of
books, abstracted from the idiosyncrasies of actual surviving copies. In one
of his most thoughtful columns on the wolfhound standard (January 1939),
he wrote that "it is of the utmost importance that a clear and reasonably
definite set of rules be laid down for judging any breed if the great benefit
which dog shows confer upon improving the breed is not to turn into a
boomerang by reason of such diverse judging that no practical ideal can be
ascertained." He continued his analysis of points not adequately covered in
the old standard through three more columns in the spring of 1939 (March,
April, May); a year
later (April 1940) he was glad to report that a committee had been formed
to look into this question ("a project very close to my heart"), and he made
additional comments throughout that year, especially on the need for
cooperation (May) and the treatment of the size of wolfhounds (September,
October). Even after he gave up his column, he still pursued the subject:
in the volume of
Annual Reports of the IWCA for 1939-40
(published 1941), he included in his list of desiderata for the Club the
impatient statement, "it is time that we took some definite action or decided
definitely to take no action"; and after the war, when new standards of
weight and height were adopted, he wrote some "Random Notes on the
Standard" (
Annual Reports, 1946-47), in which he made
further
specific suggestions for revision and advocated that an interpretive section
be added.
From then on, the only writings on dogs that Bowers published were
the occasional accounts of shows that he judged. Although he was not a
particularly active judge, his judging career spanned a thirty-year period,
from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s (he was one of the first six judges
approved by the IWCA, and he was included in the official lists of
American Kennel Club licensed judges from 1936 through
1973—qualified to judge borzois, Great Pyrenees, and Scottish
deerhounds, as well as Irish wolfhounds). Among the shows he judged were
the Greenwich in 1936 and 1938 (the presence of Raymond Whitney's
Silver making the latter "a sentimental occasion," he said in his August
1938 column, "as I afterwards found he is a son of my now deceased Ch.
Sulhamstead Gala"), the Morris and Essex and the Philadelphia in 1937, the
Westminster in 1940, the IWCA Specialty in 1948 and 1954, and the Long
Island in 1964 and 1966. In the 1940s his influence was also felt through
his service on the
Governing Committee of the IWCA.
Even though the period of Bowers's intense activity in the dog world
was relatively brief, he made a lasting place for himself in the annals of
Irish wolfhounds through the calibre of the hounds he owned and bred, the
attention his writings and opinions received, and the length of his career as
a judge. Alma J. Starbuck, in The Complete Irish Wolfhound
(1963), devoted a paragraph to Bowers in her historical section:
Fredson Thayer Bowers became active at this time with his "of the
Fen" Wolfhounds. Mr. Bowers was a great force in helping spread
Wolfhound knowledge and the club was fortunate that his scholarly articles
on the breed were published. He bred some good Hounds, and had both
imported dogs and home-breds. Mr. Bowers was an authority on the breed,
and judged some of the important fixtures.
When in 1976 the IWCA celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with a special
number of its journal,
Harp & Hound, five pages of
excerpts
from Bowers's writings were included—an honor accorded to no one
else. Besides several other scattered quotations from him and a picture of
him at the 1954 Specialty Show, this number contained, in its account of
"The First Decade" by Mrs. Kelly Fox, an informative assessment of his
contribution:
In 1930 [i.e., 1934], Fredson T. Bower[s]'s first scholarly treatises
on the breed appeared, and soon his voice in Club matters was heard. It
was largely through his efforts that the only alteration in the wording of the
Breed Standard of Excellence was ratified by the Irish Wolfhound Club of
Americ[a], i.e., "Number one, General Appearance", formerly read "the
Irish Wolfhound should not be so heavy or massive as the Great Dane, but
more so than the
Deerhound, which in general type, he should otherwise resemble", was
altered to "the Irish Wolfhound is remarkable in combining power and
swiftness with keen sight. The largest and tallest of the galloping hounds in
general type he is a rough coated grey hound-like breed".
His explanations of his position on this and other matters received
wide exposure.
Mr. Bowers was a tireless proponent of his own advanced thinking
on the Wolfhound and allied matters, and seemed to be invariably faced
with unanimous disagreement, but would press on, putting forth his
reasoning and conclusions, with no hint of self-righteousness. Today he is
proven to have been forward thinking. He never tilted at windmills but he
did wound a few sacred cows. . . .
Mrs. Starbuck, years later, was to write of him what she did of no
other, "The Club was fortunate that his scholarly artic[l]es were published.
He was an authority on the breed."
Bowers's position at the center of controversy in the dog world of the 1930s
and 1940s, as described here, foreshadowed his position in the world of
textual scholarship in the 1960s and later. Most of the scholars who debated
textual issues with him, however, had no idea that he had also played an
authoritative role in a very different field.
Bowers moved into 50 University Place, Princeton, in the summer of
1936. In his two years at Princeton, his course load consisted of two classes
of freshman English (actually literature), three sophomore preceptorials, and
a section of English A, the noncredit remedial course. Despite this heavy
schedule, and his dog columns and dog-show judging, he accomplished a
considerable amount of research, notably some of the early stages of the
work leading toward his edition of Dekker. (In the first volume of that
edition, when published in 1953, he thanked the Princeton University
Library staff for acquiring microfilms of copies of early Dekker editions for
his use.) One sign of his concentration on Dekker at this time was a
journalistic piece on The Shoemaker's Holiday that he wrote
for
the Sunday arts section of the New York Times (26
December
1937), as well as three scholarly articles on Dekker. (In the
Times piece, he asserted that "Dekker is among the select
few
[of Shakespeare's contemporaries] who can boldly face the glare of modern
foot-lights.") Altogether nearly a dozen (mostly short) scholarly articles of
his appeared in print during the two Princeton years (eight in 1937 alone),
though many of them had of course been written at Harvard. (Legend has
it that Bowers filled his Princeton colleagues' mailboxes with more offprints
than they perhaps desired.) These articles came out in major journals, like
Journal of English and Germanic Philology and
Studies in Philology, and dealt largely with revenge tragedy
(and duelling), Gascoigne, and Thomas Randolph (to whom Bowers
attributed
The Fary Knight, the manuscript of which he had
examined in the Folger Library, decided to edit, and described in a paper
called "A Long Lost Elizabethan Play" at the Modern Language Association
convention on 29 December 1936). Most of these pieces illustrate what he
said of his early writings in a 1957 account of his career (written to
accompany grant applications): "Before the late 1930's . . . I was chiefly
interested in the sociological background of Renaissance English Drama and
in the artistic forms of its tragedy."
The most important of his articles at this time, in terms of his future
career, was "Bibliographical Problems in Dekker's Magnificent
Entertainment," his first truly bibliographical article and his first
appearance in The Library, the journal of the Bibliographical
Society in London. The date of the number in which it was published,
December 1936, shows that it had been written while he was still at
Harvard, and it provides the best evidence that his mind had begun turning
toward analytical bibliography at that time. In his 1957 autobiographical
statement, he recalled that "in the late 1930's, coincidental with my starting
on post-doctoral research leading to an edition of the Plays of Thomas
Dekker, my work in large part switched towards discovering new
techniques in analytical (critical) bibliography to apply to problems of
textual criticism." Clearly one of his projects as a Dexter Scholar in
England in the summer of 1935 was the examination of multiple copies of
The Magnificent Entertainment, for he reported having
collated
the copies in the Bodleian, the British Museum, and the Victoria and Albert
Museum. Whether he saw W. W. Greg on that trip or simply corresponded
with him is not clear, but his first footnote began, "Dr. W. W. Greg has
pointed out to me. . . ." The article (seven short pages) recorded the places
where the two 1604 London editions show the same setting of type and
conjectured that, in order to speed the production of the second edition, the
type that remained standing had been transferred from the shop of Thomas
Creede (the printer named on the title page of the first edition) to that of
Edward Allde (the printer named on the title page of the second).
This reasoning is unconvincing, as Greg was quick to point out. The
next number of The Library (March 1937) printed his
three-page letter to the editor showing that "Mr. Bowers's analysis of the
bibliographical problems involved in the two London editions can be carried
somewhat further and the results presented in somewhat simpler and more
significant
form." The key point that Bowers had missed was stated by Greg at the
outset: "it is clear that neither edition was the work of a single press." On
the basis of an examination of the types in the headlines, Greg could divide
the first edition into the work of five printers and the second edition into the
work of four of those five. He also explained why the evidence supports the
view—contrary to Bowers—"that the sheets were printed in
the houses
where the type was set, and that it was the printed sheets and not the
formes of type that were collected in one office." With his usual
severity—but with good reason—Greg called Bowers's
arguments for
the transfer of the type "wholly irrelevant." And he was right to question
this extraordinarily careless sentence of Bowers's: "With sig. C1, which is
reprinted page for page but not wholly line for line, the text of the two
editions is finally joined signature for signature" (to which Greg responded,
"I am not at all sure that I know
what this means"). Greg's letter was simpler, clearer, and more plausible
than Bowers's article, and its masterly handling of bibliographical evidence
was unquestionably seen by Bowers as an object lesson (despite the fact that
he thought Greg had not been entirely fair in dealing with the situation).
Bowers's inauspicious debut as a bibliographical writer was, given his
temperament, a stimulus to learn more: from the point of view of
bibliographical history, Greg's criticism was the most significant event of
Bowers's two years at Princeton.
In his second year at Princeton, Bowers was offered a position for the
following fall as Acting Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia by
James Southall Wilson (Dean of the Department of Graduate Studies), who
apparently had in mind that Bowers might succeed John Calvin Metcalf,
then in his early seventies (and scheduled to retire in 1940). Bowers
accepted the offer and in the summer of 1938 moved to Charlottesville,
which was to remain his home for the rest of his life. Bowers had liked
Wilson immediately; they became close friends and had many occasions to
work together until Wilson's retirement in 1951 (at the age of seventy). One
mark of Bowers's fondness and respect for Wilson was his assuming the
editorship of a festschrift for Wilson in 1951; another was his
preparing the official memorial resolution when Wilson died in 1963. At
that time (28 June 1963) he wrote Wilson's widow, "I have always loved
and revered him. He was the cause of my coming to the
University, and he was an important reason why I stayed, perhaps the most
important reason. I have always said that he was one of the three or four
authentically great men whom I have known in my
lifetime." (In 1969 Bowers was one of the people who caused the new
English department building to be named "Wilson Hall," and at the
dedication ceremony Bowers was visibly moved.)
Bowers's first address in Charlottesville was 27 University Circle,
and after a year he moved to Fontaine Avenue—both locations near
the
university. In addition to freshman English, the first courses he taught were
the undergraduate survey of the seventeenth century and the graduate course
in the eighteenth-century novel. During his second year (after the summer
of 1939 in France and England), he arranged to have a course in
bibliography announced for the succeeding year, and the university bulletin
for 1940-41 duly listed him as the teacher of an advanced graduate-level
course entitled "Introduction to Bibliographical Research," with the
following description, undoubtedly written by Bowers himself:
The course will investigate methods of book-printing in the 16th,
17th, and 18th centuries as determined by bibliographical evidence. Specific
bibliographical problems, some relating directly to textual criticism, will be
assigned; practical studies will be made in paleography and in the editing
of texts, with special attention to the principles of collation and emendation.
Textbook: Introduction to Bibliography by R. B.
McKerrow.
In the next year, when "Acting" had been dropped from his title, he offered
this course again, but the bulletin announced that henceforth he would teach
it in alternate years, with an advanced course on pre-1642
non-Shakespearean drama in between ("either course," it added, "will be
offered in the off-year at the request of five or more students"). The drama
course had formerly been taught by Metcalf (though Bowers modified its
description by including as one topic the "transmission of dramatic texts"),
and Bowers was now officially assigned to three more of Metcalf's graduate
courses—on Spenser and Milton, on Elizabethan poetry and prose,
and
on seventeenth-century literature. He also was listed for a new introductory
research methods course, in which one element was "Study of the history
of the printed book from the incunabula period to the present day, with
some consideration of principles of textual criticism." Within his first four
years at Virginia, therefore, he taught, or
was scheduled to teach, most of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
courses, excluding Shakespeare, and had the opportunity to discuss textual
criticism in them, as well as in two methodological courses of his own
creation.
During these same years several significant scholarly publications of
his appeared. The most substantial was the revised version of his
dissertation,
published by Princeton University Press in 1940 as
Elizabethan
Revenge Tragedy, 1587-1642. The 300-page book was appropriately
dedicated to his dissertation adviser, Kittredge, whom Bowers further
acknowledged in his preface (dated 20 January 1940) for "the searching
criticism and the numerous suggestions which he lavished on the earliest
version of this work." Bowers also thanked Rollins and two former
Princeton colleagues, Hoyt Hudson and Thomas Parrott, among others, for
having "read and criticized" the manuscript "in various stages," and he
noted that his former wife ("Mrs. Sutphen Bowers") had "typed several
early drafts." The book followed the same general plan as the dissertation,
but with all the discussions considerably condensed; as before, the
examination of individual plays was the heart of the study, and the book
managed to consider all but eight or nine of the sixty-five plays discussed
in the dissertation. Bowers's treatment began with the code of
blood-revenge
and the influence of Seneca; he then examined the Hamlet story and Kyd's
The Spanish Tragedy and detailed their progeny in four
periods
(the focus moving from moral hero to villain to propaganda and back to
revenge, but now without an ethical dimension); and he ended with the
decline of the tradition in the "empty ingenuity and worn-out tragic
conventions which had lost all touch with the problems of human life and
ethics, and all interest in the human soul." (These closing words of the
book are practically the same as those of his dissertation and of its
published summary in 1935.)
Although the categorization underlying the structure of the book was
criticized by M. C. Bradbrook in an unfavorable assessment in
Review of English Studies (1941), and although Una
Ellis-Fermor (in Modern Language Review, 1941) felt that
Bowers had neglected English scholarship, the book was greeted with
enthusiasm by a number of reviewers. Willard Farnham, for instance,
commenting in Modern Language Quarterly (1940), felt that
such a book "was waiting to be written"; and Hazelton Spencer called it "a
better outline of the subject and a better description of its principal features
than has hitherto been available" (Modern Language Notes,
1940). One part of Spencer's praise probably gave Bowers particular
pleasure: the book, Spencer said, besides being necessary for "every
specialist," is one that general readers interested in Shakespeare "should
find rewarding and much less difficult than academic monographs are
popularly supposed to be." It has
indeed continued to have an audience: the Peter Smith firm reprinted it in
1959, and Princeton brought it out in paperback in 1966, at which time
John Lawlor called it "a classic contribution to the study of Elizabethan
drama" (Critical Quarterly, 1968). More recently George
L. Geckle said that the book "has done as much as any single work of
dramatic criticism in this century to establish the 'great tragic theme' of
those earlier centuries." For the 1959 reprint Bowers had a note (dated
September 1958) printed in the lower margin of page 9, issuing a
"warning" to the reader that his discussion had been written before "the
derived nature of the First Quarto
Hamlet text" was
established;
for the Princeton paperback (which went through several printings), he
appended to the preface a postscript (dated November 1965) noting that he
had made minor changes on five pages (those on pages 85-86 handled the
Hamlet matter) and declaring that he could not "disown" the
book, "however much one may wish to treat one's early ventures in
publication as by-blows."
A second notable publication of these years was the edition of
The Fary Knight, a previously unpublished play attributed to
Thomas Randolph, that Bowers published in 1942 as the second monograph
in the series of "University of Virginia Studies." He had begun work on the
edition while still at Princeton, for his letter in the Times Literary
Supplement on 17 April 1937 stated that he was "engaged on a
critical edition of this play," and he had published five articles on Randolph
since then. In working on Randolph, Bowers was following in Rollins's
foot-steps (Rollins had edited Randolph's The Drinking
Academy in 1930, while Bowers was at Harvard), and Bowers
dedicated his edition to Rollins. (He also acknowledged the help of
Kittredge and Greg, among many others.) The text of the Folger
manuscript, as he described it, was a revised version (revised by someone
other than Randolph) of what "probably represents Randolph's earliest
known attempt at the dramatic
form"; and in endnotes he provided numerous parallel passages from other
works of Randolph and other writers. Although he had described his project
in 1937 as a "critical edition," the text as it was completed four years later
(the preface is dated May 1941) was "a word-for-word and line-for-line
transcript," with "necessary corrections" placed in footnotes, along with a
record of the revisions on the manuscript.
This edition, the first in what would eventually be a long series of
editions from Bowers, was uncharacteristic of his later work in presenting
a diplomatic reprint as its main text, rather than a critical text incorporating
his own emendations. But it did adumbrate his later concerns in its attention
to the description of manuscript alterations: the footnotes recording
cancellations and interlineations display the earliest stage in an evolving
system for dealing with the problem. J. B. Leishman, who reviewed the
edition unfavorably in Review of English Studies (1944),
regarded the attribution to Randolph as "both improbable and
unnecessary" and found the play itself to be of "no literary value" and to
hold "little interest of any kind"; the diplomatic transcription, he believed,
was carried out with "unnecessary scrupulosity." Alfred Harbage (in
Modern Language Notes, 1944) was less severe, but he also
was not entirely convinced by the attribution; he was willing to believe,
however, that Bowers's "earnest conviction doggedly presented" did
establish a "possibility," and he found the editing "meticulously" carried
out.
Among Bowers's nine other contributions to scholarly periodicals
during these years (besides those on Randolph), two are particularly
important for the history of bibliography: his article in The
Library of December 1938 on running-titles as bibliographical
evidence and his paper on headlines (of which running-titles are a part) read
before the English Institute at Columbia University on 9 September 1941.
The former was his first major contribution to the methodology of analyzing
the physical evidence in books, and the two together, along with a paper by
his student Charlton Hinman (also delivered at the 1941 English Institute),
established the examination of running-titles as a tool of bibliographical
analysis. Running-titles had to be set in type several times in order to be
placed at the heads of the several type-pages that would be on the press
simultaneously, and sometimes several more were set for use with the type
to be printed on the other side of the sheet; but
once set, these running-titles were normally reused throughout the printing
of a book, and patterns in the recurrence of individual running-titles can
reveal facts about the printing process, as Bowers showed. Although the
reuse of running-titles had been noticed by A. W. Pollard by at least 1909
(in Shakespeare Folios and Quartos) and had been referred
to
by several other bibliographers in the intervening years (as Bowers noted),
there had been no extensive treatment of its value as bibliographical
evidence before Bowers's. Headline analysis has since become one of the
basic techniques of bibliographical investigation.
The background of that 1938 article offers some insight into Bowers's
bibliographical education—and, indeed, into the passion of his later
advocacy of bibliographical research. What happened was that, while still
at Princeton, he had published a second brief piece in The
Library ("Thomas Dekker: Two Textual Notes," in the December
1937 number), concluding that the Dyce copy of Dekker's The
Roaring Girle (1611) contained the later state of the inner forme of
sheet I. His conclusion was based on what seemed to be "corrected"
readings in the Dyce copy; but it was shown to be faulty by James G.
McManaway of the Folger Library in the September 1938 number of
The Library, which appeared shortly after Bowers's arrival
in
Charlottesville. Using running-title
evidence, McManaway demonstrated that, contrary to what the textual
evidence seemed to suggest, sheet I in the Dyce copy was in the earlier
state. McManaway, six years older than Bowers, was clearly the mentor
here, as his first footnote suggested:
The problem came to my attention when Mr. Bowers wrote, pointing
out that two settings of the running-title might be identified in The
Roaring Girle, and asked my opinion about the order in which
certain
formes of the play had been printed. My reply took, in part, the form of a
dummy of the quarto on which I noted the occurrence on each page of one
of the seven varieties of the running-title, which I described. In a day or
two he sent me a discarded proof of his article referred to above and
questioned my identification of the settings of the running-title on
I1v
and I4. With his table of variants before me, I re-examined the Folger
quarto and the Farmer facsimile of the British Museum copy (which suffers
from cropping) and formed the opinions to be given below. These I
forwarded at once to Mr. Bowers, but since The Library was
already in the mails he could not modify his printed conclusions. He in turn
loaned me his photostat of part of the Huntington copy and
gave me a report of his examination of the copy owned by Mr. Carl
Pforzheimer of New York City.
Bowers learned his lesson and, in his 1941 paper on headlines, said that he
still remembered "with considerable ruefulness" his earlier treatment of
The Roaring Girle:
Guiltless at that time of a knowledge of headlines, I decided on what
seemed decisive internal evidence in favor of one state as being the later,
only to have Dr. McManaway expose my ignorance by showing that the
resetting of the pages in the inner forme had also included the resetting of
the headlines and that these new and different headlines appeared not only
in the outer forme of sheet I but also in both formes of sheet K. Thus the
state with the altered two headlines which printed the next forme and the
next and following sheets (the original two headlines disappearing
completely) must be the later state, and by bad luck it was the state which
I had thought was the earlier. This example furnishes an object lesson in the
need for checking "internal evidence" by bibliographical evidence whenever
possible. (pp. 196-197)
When Bowers collected this piece in his 1975
Essays, he
added
a further recollection: "it was this salutary correction of my error (which
had been printed) coming on top of W. W. Greg's correction of another
bibliographical mistake I had made about Dekker's
Magnificent
Entertainment that first suggested to me I had better learn something
about bibliography if I were going to edit Elizabethan plays" (pp. 205-206).
(McManaway's article relayed an additional criticism from
Greg—that
"Mr. Bowers was ill advised to offer as bibliographical evidence" the
long dash on 4 in the Dyce copy, since long dashes and rows of hyphens
were used indiscriminately throughout.)
The lasting impression that these corrections made on Bowers is
suggested by his commenting on the matter another time in his collected
volume: he added a new footnote to the opening essay, referring to the
correction of an error he made using "pseudo-critical evidence" in his "first
fumbling approach to the text of Thomas Dekker" and concluding, "This
and another salutary shock of the same nature assisted me to become a
bibliographer" (p. 8). It seems fitting, in the light of Bowers's subsequent
major achievement in editing Dekker, that his serious entry into the
bibliographical world was occasioned by his earliest publications on
Dekker; and it was characteristic of him, feeling rebuked for overlooking
bibliographical evidence in his first two appearances in the premier
bibliographical journal, to proceed promptly to make himself into an
authority on the subject. He did not hesitate to use these two episodes as an
example of how easily one can be misled by neglecting physical
evidence; and this personal experience no doubt underlay the strength of his
drive to promote a broader awareness of analytical bibliography.
Another early instance of such promotion, besides the two articles on
headlines, occurred in a 1942 omnibus review of eight books for
Modern Language Notes. In the course of discussing Clare
Howard's edition of The Poems of Sir John Davies, Bowers
wrote,
In these bibliographical days there is much to be said for such
facsimile editions; but an editor, in my opinion, should not therefore be
released from the labor of collation to determine whether the formes are
corrected or invariant, so that the most correct original text may be made
available; nor should all possible emendations be ruled out from the notes.
We need a philosophy of editing facsimile texts, and such editors must
recognize that they have further bibliographical duties than merely printing
the text in facsimile, especially when no other good editions, as here, are
available to the scholar.
This passage, significant for its date, shows Bowers's early perception of
neglected bibliographical issues; the problem of the variant forme in a
facsimile edition was a subject that he and Charlton Hinman were to
confront in detail later on. The early 1940s may have seemed to him at the
time as "these bibliographical days"; but after the war the days would
become much more bibliographical, in no small part because of his own
activities.
In these early years in Charlottesville, Bowers became acquainted
with Nancy Hale, another New Englander transplanted to Virginia.
She was a member of an illustrious family: Nathan Hale, the Revolutionary
patriot, was the great-uncle of her grandfather (she later said—in
New England Discovery [1963]—that as she grew up
the
American Revolution seemed "almost a family affair"); Harriet Beecher
Stowe was her great-great-aunt; Edward Everett, president of Harvard, was
her great-great-uncle; Lucretia Peabody Hale, author of
The Peterkin
Papers, was her great-aunt; Edward Everett Hale, prominent
minister
and author of "The Man without a Country," was her grandfather; and her
parents, Philip Leslie Hale and Lilian Westcott Hale, were both well-known
painters (her mother was a particularly successful portrait painter; her
father, whose work was included in the 1913 Armory Show, also wrote art
criticism and taught at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts). By the time
Bowers met her, Nancy Hale (who was three years younger than Bowers,
having been born on 6 May 1908) had already published two novels and a
collection of short stories, and she was trying to finish a long third novel
while raising two sons and dealing with the deterioration of her second
marriage, a situation that led to a breakdown and a period of Jungian
analysis. (Both her marriages had been to Virginians, first to Taylor Hardin
in 1928 and then to the novelist Charles Wertenbaker in 1937, though her
years with Hardin were spent in New York, where she worked for
Vogue, Vanity Fair, and the
Times—her
few
months on the
Times in 1935 making her only the fourth
woman in fifty years to be hired as a city-room reporter there.) She and
Bowers had more in common than their New England background and the
brevity of their residence in Charlottesville: both had experienced marital
difficulties recently, and both were passionately dedicated to their writing.
They were married on 16 March 1942 (by Bowers's landlord, a minister),
and the marriage proved to be a perfect, and lifetime, match. They
respected
one another's work, and their relationship provided the kind of mutual
support that enabled them both to be productive.
The year 1942 was eventful for both of them, and not only because
of their marriage. Her ambitious novel so long in process, The
Prodigal Women, was published to great acclaim and became a
best-seller; and he entered into military duty. Before Pearl Harbor, Bowers
had been given secret instruction as a cryptanalyst in a naval
communications intelligence group being formed at the university, and he
was now asked to supervise an intelligence unit working on deciphering
enemy codes. As a Lieutenant (junior grade) in the United States Naval
Reserve, he moved to Washington (a hundred twenty miles
away)—to
3727 McKinley Street, N.W.—with his new family that included
Nancy
Hale's two sons, Mark Hardin (born 1930) and William Wertenbaker (born
1938).
(During their Washington years she wrote promotional pieces for the
Treasury Department.) Bowers threw himself into the work with
characteristic enthusiasm and energy, and he was eventually promoted to
Lieutenant Commander. One story of his wartime activity has been well
recounted by E. D. Hirsch (in his memorial resolution for Bowers at the
University of Virginia faculty meeting on 23 April 1991):
Bowers was in charge of a Naval Communications group that
successfully devoted itself to cracking Japanese ciphers. He worked at that
task with a tenacity and electromotive force that kept him going at flank
speed long beyond the appointed eight-hour day. On one occasion when his
colleagues had reached the point of exhaustion, the group appointed a
charming young WAVE to go ask Commander Bowers whether the team
might not begin keeping normal Navy work hours so they could catch up
on their sleep. Bowers looked up in genuine astonishment and said, "I don't
understand you people. Don't you want to win the
war?"
A concern with sleep was understandable, since the work was scheduled on
a twenty-four-hour watch system, in which the time of each individual's
eight-hour shift changed every three days. For Bowers the excitement of the
search made up for the disruptive effects of this plan; and after the war he
would describe the exhilaration that came when the solution of a code with
scrambled five-digit sets finally fell into place and he realized that he had
learned the location of a Japanese warship.
The group assembled in the Naval Communications Annex at Ward
Circle was remarkable—a "dismayingly bright bunch," in the words
of
William H. Bond (who said that in odd moments they would engage in such
activities as "playing blindfold chess"). The unit included Archibald Hill
and William Weedon from the University of Virginia (English and
philosophy), Richmond Lattimore (the classicist from Bryn Mawr), Samuel
Thorne (the legal historian, then at Northwestern), Walter Rideout (then a
teaching assistant at Harvard), and Stephen Parrish (who had just graduated
from the University of Illinois), among others. But from the point of view
of bibliographical history, the most important fact is that the group also
included Giles Dawson and Ray O. Hummel of the Folger Library staff,
and William H. Bond and Charlton Hinman, who had been Folger Research
Fellows together in 1941-42. Bond, later to head the Houghton Library,
was then a student of Rollins's at Harvard; he had become interested
in bibliographical analysis while at the Folger and had written a pioneering
article on half-sheet imposition (published in the September-December 1941
number of The Library). Hinman had been Bowers's first
dissertation student (earning
a Ph.D. in 1941) and had "with great originality pushed ahead" in
developing techniques for analytical bibliography (to use Bowers's words
at the 1941 English Institute). The method followed in the intelligence unit
for comparing successive photographs of enemy fortifications, to see
whether changes had been made, gave Hinman the idea for a machine to
facilitate collating the texts of copies of books from the same
typesetting—a machine put together, as Bond described it, "from bits
taken from Giles Dawson's son's Erector set, two slide projectors, and
sundry electric motors, mirrors, etc." After the war, he developed into a
more sophisticated form what came to be known as the Hinman Collator
and used it to compare copies of the Shakespeare First Folio at the Folger
Library.
It seems appropriate that several of the scholars interested in
analytical bibliography after the war, including the two leaders of the field
(Bowers and Hinman), spent their wartime years performing cryptanalytic
work together, for the goal of both activities is to find meaningful patterns
in what at first seem to be chaotic data, and the bent of mind required for
both is obviously similar. (Indeed, in a letter of 22 October 1985, Bowers
referred to "breaking the code of the two different systems of compositor
marking" in two of Hawthorne's books.) Bowers's wartime training
doubtless gave stimulus to his postwar bibliographical research, and it
certainly showed him the excitement that can reward the indefatigable
analysis of details. When the war was over, in 1945, to returned to
Charlottesville and began the steady building of what was to become one
of the most distinguished and influential careers in the history of American
scholarship.